Moves at Deadline Will Determine Playoff Hopes This Season

The moves that the Philadelphia 76ers do or don’t make at the NBA trade deadline will make or break their playoff hopes this season.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the Philadelphia 76ers are popping up in some of the early rumors related to the NBA trade deadline. From the beginning of this season, the Sixers have been a team that has been pegged as one that has to get a deal done. While they weren’t necessarily looking to make a really convincing playoff run when this season started, they still needed to move a big man this season in order to maintain a positive future for the team.

The Sixers have one too many big men. They currently have Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, and Nerlens Noel all on contract as players that have been drafted in the NBA Lottery range over the last few years. On top of that, they have Richaun Holmes, a second-round pick that has proven to be valuable, especially here in his sophomore season.

While the Sixers would clearly like to move one of their lottery pick bigs (since they seem to have the most value, and the least desire to run as a backup center and do that job well) it’s ironic that Richaun Holmes seems to be getting the most interest out of the four players so far (of course, teams haven’t reached out about Joel Embiid because he’s almost certainly not on the market for any price).

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The NBA trade deadline is on February 23rd, and the time to submit paperwork on trades is 3 pm sharp. We should expect the Sixers to be players in any deals around the league right up to the last minute.

The main goal for the Sixers should be to move either Jahlil or Nerlens and get a decently fair price for them. Now, what teams around the league define as fair price and what the Sixers define as fair price may be quite different in definition. The way outsiders see it, the Sixers have to deal a big, so in a way, the teams that take their big shouldn’t have to give up as much as the players’ market value because they are, in a sense, doing the Sixers a favor of sorts.

At the same time, the Sixers believe that each of their young big men are talented and could find a valuable role on most NBA teams, so they don’t seem willing to give them up for cheap.

That said, none of their trade-able bigs hold a ton of value right now. Nerlens Noel’s contract expires after this season, meaning that his price tag for the team that absorbs his contract will skyrocket for whatever team he is on after this season. Okafor has proven that he can’t play defense (still) and shows no makings of being an offensive leader like we thought he might be coming into the NBA.

Holmes, although a very hard worker, has the unfair stigma of being a second-round draft pick attached to him, which may influence the way he is perceived in an NBA value sense in a negative way for some time. That’s not necessarily fair, but that’s the way it works. It also doesn’t help that the Sixers have been unable to offer Holmes much playing time.

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The Sixers have a lot of moves they could possibly make. While it doesn’t seem like things are too positive right now given the market for big men, the team may be able to get a decent value for their bigs, they might just have to get creative. They may find a team who needs another solid piece that the Sixers can offer — a playmaker in Sergio Rodriguez or T.J. McConnell, or maybe a utility shooter in Gerald Henderson, or perhaps even a Swiss Army Knife type of player like Eersan Ilyasova — and they could package a big and that extra player for a player of solid return.

The Sixers could also help themselves in that regard by getting some salary off of the books. While I wouldn’t want to see Henderson or Ilyasova go, Henderson is taking up nearly $10 million next year (although that is a pretty insignificant amount under the new rising cap) and Ilyasova looks to be an expensive re-sign this offseason.

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The Sixers, if they’re really dedicated to actually turning this rebuild around, need to prove it to the league. The way they can do that is making the playoffs this year.

While that seems like it should be a far-off concept, the Sixers’ stellar January where they went 10-5 (even though they didn’t have Joel Embiid for 9 games) has them set in the 14th spot in the Eastern Conference. That in itself seems, well, awful, but because the bottom portion of the Eastern Conference is so tightly stacked at the moment, the Sixers are just 4.5 games behind the 8th seed, which would put them in the playoffs.

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One of the biggest things that’s held the Sixers back is that logjam in the frontcourt. The team has had to often sit Richaun Holmes plus either Noel or Okafor on any given night depending on injuries, the opposing team’s matchup, and things like that.

It’s arguable that when the team runs Embiid with a backup of Noel (or even Noel with a backup of Holmes) they are at a level of defense that isn’t even close to matchable with what Okafor can do as a backup. So moving him would be top priority in the short-term for the playoffs just because if playoffs are the goal, right now, Okafor doesn’t fit.

This doesn’t necessarily mean Okafor can’t fit in the long term if some pieces are shifted. But right now, Okafor is the odd man out, and if the goal is playoffs right now, the most efficient combination is without Okafor.

While one could argue that the team could not make a trade and still be pretty efficient in the frontcourt (by sitting Okafor) it’s not the best allocation of their resources. Why sit a player when they could exchange him for a different player who might fit Bettie with the current roster?

It makes sense, and in a perfect world, the Sixers should move Okafor for a better fit. But this is not a perfect world. Over the last three years, it’s been anything but a perfect world for the Sixers.

The team should be looking to make a trade at the deadline, and they need to ask themselves when looking at potential trades just how important each avenue and possible outcome is. Is the short-term, and making the playoffs a priority? Or is the long-term more valuable, making missing the playoffs okay this year?

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Maybe it’s a healthy balance of both. Whatever the case, the Sixers will have almost no shot with a tough road-heavy post-All-Star break if they don’t get a good trade in return for a big.